Photograph by: Frank Gunn
, THE CANADIAN PRESS

After consecutive seasons of staging both the Canadian Football League and Canadian Interuniversity Sport championship games together in the same city, the duo will take a hiatus next year.

Despite pairing up in Vancouver in 2011 and Toronto on Nov. 23 — where a Vanier Cup record crowd of 37,098 watched Laval hand McMaster a 37-14 defeat two days before the 100th Grey Cup — Regina, host of the 101st Grey Cup, didn’t emerge as a serious candidate to host the Vanier next year.

“We know that Regina will not be able to handle both the Grey Cup and the Vanier Cup, so we’ll be looking at an alternative location,” CIS president Leo MacPherson explained. “We’ve seen the success the last two years when the Vanier Cup and the Grey Cup are married together. It’s a great celebration of football, but also it’s a great opportunity to turn CFL fans onto the university game.”

With the city’s 3,500 hotel spaces already booked to capacity for Grey Cup weekend next year, logistics scuttled any discussion of hosting both games in 2013.

“We didn’t receive any expression of interest from the University of Regina,” MacPherson said. “The capacity issue of space and hotels and everything else (in Regina) made it a non-starter.”

A clear indication of where the 2013 Vanier Cup will be staged could come as early as January, when the CIS board will have the opportunity to vote on a report currently being compiled by CIS staff regarding the successes of the last two Vaniers, as well as the future of the game.

“We don’t want to be less than a year away from a Vanier Cup championship without the host being determined, but that’s where we are at this particular point in time,” MacPherson pointed out. “In an ideal world we’ll have a year and two years notice moving forward.”

Among the issues still up in the air for the Vanier Cup in the coming years is whether or not the partnership between Hamilton Tiger-Cats owner Bob Young’s sports marketing company MRX, which has been credited with helping to elevate the Vanier’s exposure, and the game continues.

“It was a two-year contract that covered the 2011 and 2012 Vanier Cups. There are elements in there where we’ve talked about an extension and those are some of the options we’re weighing right now,” MacPherson said.

As for potential hosts, the CIS received letters of interest in the fall. Groups in multiple cities, including Montreal and Calgary — both of which have never hosted the event before — want to host the 2013 game.

“In the fall, CIS asked all its football members to submit letters of interest if they had any in the Vanier Cup for 2013. They were non-binding on both sides — it was kind of a fact-finding mission for CIS to gauge interest,” University of Calgary assistant athletic director Ben Matchett explained. “The University of Calgary with several partners in the city put forward a letter of interest.”

Despite Calgary coming off its fifth-straight Canada West conference title this season, the Dinos attendance at McMahon Stadium has lagged well behind football powers around the rest of CIS. Hosting the Vanier is seen as a way to potentially change that.

“We’ve been struggling with attendance here, as it’s widely known across the country,” Matchett pointed out. “To be able to bring a high profile event like that with some significant partners behind it — the Stampeders would be heavily involved in it, our alumni group, there’s some other organizations in the city that would get behind a big event like that — we hope it would be a kick start to enhancing the profile of CIS football in the city.”

“Our hope would be that CIS would look at it not as a risk to come to Calgary, but more an opportunity to build the product in a major market in the country where it needs building.”

With no firm date set by CIS with regards to when they’ll decide the host for next year’s Vanier, even if Calgary was tabbed by CIS as the preferred host for 2013, timing will be key for the U of C in determining whether or not to take on the challenge.

“The further this goes, the longer this goes, the more difficult it is for a new host to come into the mix. And if it’s into the spring before the game is actually awarded, it becomes really difficult to do the job that needs to be done for a game in 2013,” Matchett said.

“The University of Calgary is committed to bringing the Vanier Cup to Calgary and whether that happens next year, that would be great, but at some point we want the game to be played at McMahon Stadium.”

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